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Seward, Stanton, Grant, Hay and Nicolay, and others come off so fine as to motivate further curiosity about them. I chose this because of the story of Obama's reading it and finding things worth emulating, and because it was supposed to be terrific. Lincoln was simply amazing at seeing both details AND the big picture, knowing when and how to be patient, leading to successful timing of actions, and in being able to be secure enough to allow personal affronts if that meant focusing on higher objectives. This one is great.
She used detail, quotes, and observations from what had to have been exhaustive and meticulous learning on her part. I will surely look into her other biographies. In Goodwin's sure hands, the people and times of Lincoln's life flow with terrific clarity. My own biography doubt was thoroughly cured in the reading.
Grant, ". The women and children and families are also important and included and well done, Lincoln's wife Mary, Chase's daughter, Seward's wife, and many others come to mind. I certainly hope so and it is. Others, Chase and McClelland and to some degree Fremont, do not fare so well.
The other people surrounding Lincoln are likewise made so lucidly that it is easy to understand them as humans of mixed qualities and wholeness. In the words of Union General Ulysses S. he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other (man)".
Just the the type of enthusiasm you would imagine she would have for her craft (and a big thrill for me). When I told her that I had, she hung on my every word and began asking me questions. I have to admit, upfront, that my love for Doris Kearns Goodwin is exceeded only by my love for Abraham Lincoln.DKG captures Lincoln's complexity as no one has before, and intimately captures his essence as she has with Johnson, Kennedy, and (most notably)FDR.I had the opportunity to speak with her when she first began writing this book. At that time she had not been to Springfield.
This isn't just a history lesson though, as this book plays out one of the greatest stories of American history and one of the most powerful eras of change in our country, as well as a story of how an unlikely team of political enemies were united toward a common and lofty cause. A great biographical history of the man himself.
Wow. I finished the whole thing in about a week and now I'm shopping for more biographies on Amazon. I'm not a fan of biographies. Tons of information on Lincoln (and the others), but told in a fascinating way. As far as I can tell, this is an outstanding example of the genre. In fact, I don't know that I'd read an entire biography since grade school. However, as began to hear more about Lincoln in the news and saw an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin on television, I borrowed "Team of Rivals" from my father and went to work.
He beat the odds against the chances that a poor boy, destined for illiteracy and manual labor, could become a self-educated lawyer, and that an obscure one-term Congressman, (the only one of the four 1860 presidential rivals who was without privilege and was not backed by rich and connected power brokers), could not only be elected, but become the most eloquent, inspiring President our country has had. Lincoln actually openly admonished the firebrand Abolitionists who formed the vocal leadership. Thus, under Lincoln, America's creed changed from "All men are created equal and are endowed with inalienable rights by their Creator---BUT--SOME MEN ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS" to ALL men are created equal. Team of Rivals highlights a previously under appreciated aspect of Lincoln's greatness--how his masterful blend and use of empathy and toughness in personal diplomacy, enabled him to establish his truly unique "Team of Rivals" cabinet. Lincoln did this all by his inspirational leadership, in four short but dizzying years--before he became one more of those who died for this cause. He did this in part by simultaneously holding off the fanatic abolitionists on the other side who inflamed division and who without his influence, had been unable to see that timing, and patience were paramount in getting opponents of emancipation to come to their views. This book on Lincoln, thus manages to offer something new and illuminating to the reader, and more than earns its place within the longstanding formidable body of scholarship on Lincoln.
Team of Rivals is unique in this focus on how Lincoln masterfully commandeered his former opponents into a powerful Executive that helped him navigate the biggest crisis our nation ever faced. Lincoln made the fanatics patient enough to wait, and the cynics tolerant enough to see that freeing Negroes was not a frightening specter, but a practical and just end. Goodwin accounts how Lincoln slowly developed a strategy that could win over the millions of Americans, both Northern and Southern (in the border states), who were taught for generations what the slave-owning liberators of white men--Washington and Jefferson--believed: that slavery was just in their God's eyes, because "someday", inexorably, it would die a natural death, because.well because this was America with its great Manifest Destiny, authored by Divine Will. This book thus deepened the understanding of how a man who is without ego, humble, compassionate, and gifted with the eloquence and spirit to communicate to a melting pot of countrymen, can move men on the personal, the group, and the grand national scale alike, to believe that that which united them all, was worth dying for and saving; that this common ground must trump the differences between them. Lincoln had long studied the history of what he framed as the greatest paradox of America--that this nation which was first to successfully fight for liberty, was the only Western nation that still enslaved its inhabitants.
Biographies have focused on his beating all the other odds stacked against him: against his ever being elected to the Presidency, and against the chances that one man could inspire our nation's disparate interests and people to rise to the occasion to save not only the Union, but the greatest ideal that inspired this Union's creation--that all men are created equal. He warned them that their public brandishing of a "superior" Christian creed as giving them the license to force its moral views down the throats of all men of "lesser" faith, was backfiring. Goodwin expands her focus beautifully in this book, to recount how Lincoln's ultimate marshaling all these forces enabled him to reach his crowning achievement against all odds: uniting former bigots, myopic Copperheads, and men of warring ideologies, to agree first that free Negroes would make great soldiers, and then that as such, they must then be forever free. A President who would meld enemies and power hungry rivals into a brilliant Cabinet team of loyal allies, all very smart and savvy, tireless, and efficient, and all growing more deferential over time, and yielding to him the final say in the end, through every crisis that threatened their Cabinet's cohesiveness. Thus he managed to lead generals and soldiers, wealthy and poor, new immigrants and sixth generation American aristocrats alike, to fight side by side, and die in thousands, to hold the country together.
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